Some highlights: I'm fit, self-aware, well-educated, emotionally available, travelled, articulate, and communicative.

I've been in the Bay Area for ten years, having lived in Europe for a long time before that. I'm a varied mixture of American, Irish, and European.

I'm a writer and software engineer with a lot of intellectual curiosity and a strong interest in political questions. I love games of most kinds, from board games to pool to tennis. I'm committed to honesty and take an existentialist view on personal responsibility. I care deeply about my friends and look for deep bonds with kindred spirits.

I'm also a terrible smartass, opinionated, stubborn, can be overly blunt, and can take things more seriously than I should. And I'm not really deep-down convinced that those things are flaws...

I am open-minded, analytical, and wry

Working on web applications. CrossFit. Writing. Trying to understand why people can be so easily manipulated into acting against their own interests while also wondering if that question is inherently elitist. Having fun with games, tennis, and squash. Reading. Enjoying San Francisco. Struggling mightily right now with making this more interesting than a simple list.

wordplay, seeing many sides of an argument, political analysis.

It used to be the hair, but now? Maybe the eyes, more likely the fact that I'm outspoken and (I like to think) well-spoken.

Books: a random smattering would include The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Consider the Lobster, The Big Sleep, The Dispossessed, House of Leaves, Consider Phlebas, Perdido Street Station, the Illuminatus! trilogy, The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Black Swan, At Swim-Two-Birds. Bonus info--the five books I read just before creating this profile were Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman; Reaper's Gale; The Conscience of a Liberal; Never Let Me Go; and A Fine Balance.

Movies: Blade Runner, Young Frankenstein, Goodfellas, Brick, Inland Empire, Godfather 1&2, Dr. Strangelove, The Usual Suspects, Hana-Bi, The Terminator, and Alien are what spring to mind.

Music: my tastes tend to vary, recently I've been listening to Underworld, Jenny Owen Youngs, The Sisters of Mercy, The Kleptones, Leftfield, and the KLF.

Food: Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese. Also lots of others, and I like to explore new restaurants, good food being a major advantage possessed by the Bay Area.

Conceptual: truth, love, creativity, play, justice/fairness, humor.

Physical: books, bicycles, computers, music, exercise, sneakers.

Sex. Politics. Public transport. Data and how it should be structured. Whether or not it's possible to be rational, and how/when we should bypass our heuristics. Prejudice. Whether it's possible to really effect significant change, and if so, how? Plot and other aspects of whatever I'm working on creatively.

doing something from this list: going out with friends; writing; reading; playing squash; eating out; playing a game of some sort; watching a movie.

I'll go with three things.

1. I've been on public access television.

2. I've worn a costume that made people do triple-takes in the Castro. On Halloween.

3. Passion, desire, and sex are all very important to me, and each is insufficiently present in my life right now.

You're smart, open-minded, and appreciative of dry humor, or if you for some other reason think we'd get along.

(Note: I don't do IM on this site; to me IM is for communicating with people I already know, and with those people I use the various major IM services.)